E3 2011: Why Rage will run better on PC

We recently spoke with Id Software co-founder John Carmack about some of the technical benefits we'll get from playing Rage on PC instead of consoles. Without the texture memory limits of the Xbox 360 and PS3, we can expect sharper textures, even at lower resolutions. At high resolutions, we can expect close to "three times the unique pixels the consoles can."

It's best to let technical wizard John Carmack explain this one. "One of the significant things that's not really obvious is that because we break everything up into these texture pages, the consoles are limited because they don't have enough memory and on the PS3 you can't go larger than a 4096 squared texture," he says.

"There's a lot of scenes that really need more than that on there, so a lot of scenes sort of hit an upper limit on the consoles, where on the PC where we can use an 8k by 8k texture for that we can bring in higher fidelity. So even if you're running the PC version at 720p resolution you'll get crisper graphics on there.

"If you crank it all the way up to run at 1080p or higher then you can put of twice, probably closer to three times the unique pixels the consoles can."

So there you have it. Carmack also mentions that high end graphics cards will be able to run the game well with anti-aliasing, too. Carmack also told us that current PCs are " an order of magnitude " more powerful than consoles. Rage is due out on September 13 in the US, and September 16 everywhere else. You can watch our interview with John Carmack in full right here .

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tom stopped being a productive human being when he realised that the beige box under his desk could play Alpha Centauri. After Deus Ex and Diablo 2 he realised he was cursed to play amazing PC games forever. He started writing about them for PC Gamer about six years ago, and is now UK web ed.